By Marianne Lincoln

This week is for chasing water. I am leading the Chambers Clover Creek Watershed Council on a trip to Graham. This is the far eastern edge of a watershed that takes up the center of Pierce County. This watershed has no glacier fed rivers. It does not flow from the Cascade mountains. It is fed only by rainfall, sits in a bowl created by tectonic forces, and scooped out by ancient glaciers, and runs by gravity into Puget Sound.

Looking at the map of Pierce County, the Clover/Chambers system runs in a very northwesterly direction similar to a line from the top of Mt. Rainier to Puget Sound at Chambers Bay. Groundwater in the County flows this way as well. In WRIA12, the water actually does not begin at the mountain. It is all from rainfall.

The water flows that way. The County is angled that way as well. But the real creek itself wiggles around finding the path of least resistance with a fairly shallow presence on the surface of the ground. In fact, it disappears underground several months of the year. The folks that drill wells know they will find it within 30 feet.

The odd thing about Clover Creek is that historically, settlers have tried to move it, dam it, and redirect it in many places. Its propensity to flood in the Spring was annoying to farmers. A large section of the creek in Parkland was moved away from the PLU Campus to the asphalt lined ditch along Tule Lake Road. The former bed, still on maps, is visible from Ainsworth Avenue between Washington High School and the Rainier View Christian Church. The apple trees that lined it for many years are gone as well. In Lakewood another section was under what is now the Lakewood Towne Center, redirected from entering Steilacoom Lake’s east side to entering the lake from the south end.

Derek Faust, Ph.D., of Clover Park Technical College, created a map, the link is here, of all the places he could find that the creek was altered since 1832 when the Hudson Bay Company showed up and settlers began streaming into the territory. Don Russell, a lifelong water steward, referred to this as “immigrant population drainage ditch hydro modification mania.”

There is an oral history of the Chambers Clover Creek system at the Tacoma Library as well. A link can be found here.

If you look at a topographical map of Pierce County, the movement of water makes more sense. Melting glaciers from over 10,000 years ago carved out valleys and oxbows where water pops up out of the ground when the upper aquifer (water table) is high. In this map I have marked the places we are visiting where the water breaches the surface of the ground at Hidden Valley, Pioneer Valley, Frederickson, and Stony Lake.

Near Emerald Ridge High School, there is a high point where the direction changes and water flows toward the Puyallup River Valley. The yellow circle on the map is the location of the Tacoma Sportsman’s Club. From that point, Clover Creek becomes visible above the surface much of the year. In Parkland, west of the former Brookdale Golf Course, it disappears underground in summer until it meets with Spanaway Creek coming out of Spanaway Lake.

Hydrology and water resources offer a number of very excellent areas for study and employment. Water companies exist every place there are people. Some systems are extremely complex and the people employed can make a good living. If you have teenagers wondering what they might want to do in their future, you may want to direct them to one of the volunteer groups that maintain the creeks and rivers. It might be the beneficial path for their own future.

After the “Upstream Underground Water Tour” is complete Wednesday, I will add a couple more photos.

UPDATE: We all left in a Pierce County van driven by Emile Ancelet, a water quality planner from Surface Water Management. We had three from WSU Extension Center in Puyallup, one from Clover Park Technical College, a retired Department of Ecology employee, a descendant of James Longmire, our CCWC President, and a couple journalists. Most of them had never been that far east in Pierce County.

Most of the trip was from inside the van, but we did stop at the Uplands, a new, enormous housing development east of Emerald Ridge High School. This is where the watershed splits and the vale that contains Clover Creek water runs the other direction as Horse Haven Creek to the Puyallup Valley near Orting. You can see the day was lovely for a tour.

The trees on the other side of the Horse Haven Creek Valley show all the trees that were denuded in the Uplands project. It really is equivalent to burning down the Amazon forest.

One of the planners asked why the county put the urban growth boundary so far south. I almost laughed out loud hearing a county planner say that. He is young and was not around for the political theatrics of the day. Here we are 36 years later, still stripping trees and building massive sprawl developments. Yes, that is not what growth management was supposed to do. (shrug, we did argue that at the time)

On the ground water and rainfall issues, we saw Forest Lake in the oxbow down about 16 inches from a couple months ago when Renee and I planned this trip. At Stony Lake, we could barely see the water level at the end on 30th Avenue. It is August and the water table is definitely hiding from the sunshine.

There is one new debate. The Pierce County Urban Forest planner and the WSU Urban Forest person both felt the dead, 130 year old sequoia tree at the Miller place was not dead from drought, but from the winter flooding. It sits where the County used FEMA funds to buy out a couple homeowners whose houses regularly flooded on 138th Street. The mysteries of this creek are ongoing.